I'll Hold a Lantern, Put Your Heel on the Shore
by ohmyohpioneer
Summary: Emma needs a new place, and Killian is all at sea.


If he's being completely honest with himself, he'd never thought beyond this point (or _to_ this point, more accurately).

He'd learned to talk bold words of taking and winning, but in reality, Swan was never his to win (he wasn't a punishment anyone deserved, his loathsome sorrow and seatossed loneliness). It was a truth he'd accepted, swaddled in her too rare smiles and captivating determination, and carried as a precious burden.

And now that her lips are brushing sighs against his, he's at a loss; he's all at sea and it is _splendid_.

* * *

So when Swan goes searching for new living quarters, he's not sure where he lands in all of it.

Henry's included him in their huddled morning discussions at Granny's, syrup sticky hands excitedly pointing to circled sections of the paper. Hook looks at the words - two bedroom, one bathroom, monthly lease - and remembers them from the mornings he had traced similar listings in New York (where he couldn't afford to live, where he'd been delusional enough to think he could follow Swan to – a place so glaringly _not his_).

"Oh! Killian!" Henry's voice excitedly cracks around a mouthful of waffles, "Look at this one! It's right near the docks."

Emma doesn't seem to be bothered by Henry's train of thought because her hand doesn't move from its place woven around his underneath the table.

He is relying on Swan for all of these cues because other than providing her with unwavering love (which is well beyond his control, frankly), he's under her command, following the rigging and ropes of her lead.

"And what trouble, pray tell, do you plan to get into near the docks, young sir?"

The boy grins, toothy and earnest, "I thought maybe you could teach me how to sail?"

"Henry…" Emma's voice is a warning, and her hand tightens slightly in his own.

Killian, for his part, definitely did not factor any of this into his life, well, ever – not in the year without Swan, not in the endless expanses of rage and drink before that – this abundance of affection and _people_. And now that it's here, he's clumsy and graceless with its delicate heft.

But this is precious, and he carries it close to his chest. "You do know that a sailor must learn quite a bit before he can set foot on a vessel?"

Henry nods vigorously.

"And you're prepared for that? It's not easy, the seafaring life."

"Yes!"

He casts a feigned look of disapproval. "What was that?"

To his credit, Henry recovers quickly. "Yes, captain!"

This is Killian's now – these are the words and motions of his life – and the tug of his lips is his and _theirs_, too. "Aye. Much better."

* * *

The first place they tour is declared to be too small. (Swan notes the tight confines of the living space, the close proximity of the bedrooms, the shared bathroom, and tells Henry they'll have better luck next time.)

Next time brings them to the forested outskirts of town, a welcoming stone cabin that has red shutters on its windows and a jocund chimney. Henry seems taken with the house, bouncing from room to room, imagining a life in each corner, but Emma seems less enthusiastic. ("There's not a lot of natural light, is there?" she asks, running her finger along a window pane that looks out into a deep thicket of wood.)

In the end, they drive her rickety vessel down the rocky path to the shoreline just beyond the old cannery with the town in full-view. They climb the stairs of a wind-worn dwelling adorned with unpainted shingles, grayed with age – a fisherman's home if ever he saw one – and when the door creaks open to the bright, open space of the second floor apartment, Swan's entire face glows (and Killian can't be sure it's not from the sun glancing off the sea).

* * *

"Careful with that!" he can hear Emma's shout as he hauls a large box up the stairs.

"Sorry!" Henry calls in return, and the lad skips past him back down to David's truck – stacked high with similar containers – parked in the small drive in front.

It's been a long day of wrapping items in thick paper and placing them in boxes to be carted across town to Swan's new home.

"Where does this one go, love?" He can't see her around his cargo, but he can hear her (happily) scuffling across the wooden floors.

"Ummm," she hums distractedly, "you can just set it down right where you are."

When he looks up from gingerly depositing the package, she's staring out the yawning bay window, the goldpink light of the sunset gilding the strands of hair that have escaped her braid, and she has never been _lovelier_ than this moment.

"Mom!" Henry clambers up the stairs – endless energy, that boy – and grabs his jacket from its place flung across the kitchen counter. "Grandpa wants to take us Granny's!"

But she doesn't move from her position, arms tucked across her body and mouth twisted in thought. "You go on ahead with David, there's a lot of unpacking to do on this end," she tells him, thick sigh sweet and briny.

"Ok!"

Killian never imagined this accumulation of things; towers of clothing and plates and books.

His home for so long had always traveled with him, his possessions (his brother's) making the churning, rocking journey from port to port, and this grounded existence of objects is nothing he could have conjured.

When the world grows dark, he and Swan are still removing items, one by one, from each container. His hand unwinds the wrappings of a framed picture (Emma, Henry, a great bridge), and as with every aspect of Emma, he does so with immense care.

He gently places the memento on a nearby shelf, glancing his fingers along the top to brush off pretended dust, and when he turns, Emma is mapping each of his movements.

(They kiss among the stacked boxes, and he wishes this, too, could be enveloped in paper and nestled safely to carry from place to place to place.)

* * *

At night, she sometimes sits on the balcony overlooking the harbor, woolen blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

He watches carefully the cutout she makes against the sea and the stars, but makes no move to join her. Solitude, he knows, is a habit for both of them, and while those moments of quietude are fewer now, it's not something either of them can afford to do away with completely.

There are demons to be contended, there are memories to unfold, consider, cherish, hate.

(And he swathes the wooden planks and the hull and the masts in sailcloth and tucks them into deep recesses to carry from day to day to day.)

He assembles his own (new) remembrances from the mussed white of her hair, the slight depression in the bed beside him, soft and cool, the hushed collision of the waves bellow, her bent knees, the heart of her face, silver and stoic.

Every plane and point of her illuminated against the curved universe is _right_.

* * *

"You can ask for help, you know."

It's a constant battle with her, whether to resist or ease into the radiance of her upturned mouth.

"I've got it, I've got it," he insists, curling his fingers rigidly against the wooden instruments.

He doesn't have to look up to know that she's intently studying his attempts, feet and legs tucked, arm thrown, perfectly content on the couch beside him. "Mmmm," she agrees without agreeing at all.

The _television_ is casting vibrant shapes on her cheeks, and this is strangely routine, too; another entirely, phenomenally unremarkable evening of _Chinese_ food and _films._

"I won't judge you for using a fork," she provides.

_Now_ he chooses to glare. "I can handle your _chompsticks_, thank you."

He wants to memorize the way she tugs her lower lip in, wants to forego whatever strange tale they are about to view, but he's found that these nights are the ones he reflects on most; the hours that breathe together and glow when he lies awake at Granny's. They are murmured and soft at the edges, with Swan rosy and warm from wine; hushed syllables and husky laughs. They are when the pads of his fingers can press at the crease in her elbow, at the place where her foot and ankle meet, where all of her delicate bones form _her_.

She hasn't spoken, and he knows her well enough now (knows her to a depth that is startling and wholly unfamiliar) to recognize when words are seeping out of her as loudly as if she had said them aloud. "_What_, Swan? Just say it."

"Keep the bottom one stable, remember?" her own carton of something made with long noodles is on the table, forgotten.

"Yes, yes, it's bloody stable."

He wants to get this _right_, wants to do so many things right for her, and he _will_ get this piece of chicken from its bed of rice to his mouth if it is the last blasted thing he does.

Her gaze is heavy, and he needs to do this, just as he needs to watch _Nestflecks _and use a _telephone _and know when she sighs in gladness and know when she sighs in sorrow and _be whole._ And _finally _he clamps down on the stray piece of poultry, bringing it from container to mouth.

There's an embered glint when she looks at him, chewing ostentatiously at his _sesamed chicken_, and when she parts her lips he expects a halfhearted scolding, but instead–

"Move in with me."

He thinks of that picture frame and its place in her home; how it had been absent from her life until it was _just there _and how it is now sewn into this place and this world and who she is and what she _loves_.

"Alright."

* * *

He counts: one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.

The clouds over the calm sea are dark, and the low moon is yellow in the sky.

There are no thunder claps, no flashes of lightning, and the only sounds are the guttural rumbles of the ebbing tide, the airy exhales from the stillness at his back.

Four one thousand, five.

"Killian?"

Her question is gossamer, but undeniably _real_, and he can stop counting now (counting the space that eats at him between what he knows is real and what he imagines is a dream).

He is not leagues from where she is, but _breaths._

And sometimes solitude is another word for loneliness. When she wraps her fingers around his wrist, when she fixes a firm kiss between his shoulder blades, he is grounded and at sea and _hers._

"Come on, the ocean will be there tomorrow."

"Aye."


End file.
